[lbo-talk] Fwd: so much for the WMD's

[joanna bujes]

>washingtonpost.com
>Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq
>Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons
>
>By Barton Gellman
>Washington Post Staff Writer
>Sunday, May 11, 2003; Page A01
>
>
>BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons
>of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding
>proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed
>arms, according to participants.
>
>The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been
>described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to
>discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure,
>expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared
>objective of the war.
>
>Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms
>treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and
>special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They
>said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
>described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of
>biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the
>agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.
>
>Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force
>members said in interviews.
>
>Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month,
>said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that
>Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of
>chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits"
>for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there
>had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books
>will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."
>
>Army Col. Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the
>Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think
>we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added,
>"That's what we came here for, but we're past that."
>
>Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found
>themselves lacking vital tools. They consistently found targets identified
>by Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both. Leaders and
>members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior officers
>guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions now
>to "check the blocks" on a prewar list.
>
>U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites.
>Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD
>sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the
>potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45
>surveyed without success.
>
>Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven
>weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the
>search has barely begun.
>
>In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1,
>President Bush said, "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and
>biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be
>investigated." Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for
>intelligence, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that U.S. forces
>had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on
>the "integrated master site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies
>before the war.
>
>But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller
>number of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly
>disappointing, participants said.
>
>"Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard
>L. Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in disgust to
>a colleague during last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and
>survey results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."
>
>Survey teams have combed laboratories and munitions plants, bunkers and
>distilleries, bakeries and vaccine factories, file cabinets and holes in
>the ground where tipsters advised them to dig. Most of the assignments
>came with classified "target folders" describing U.S. intelligence leads.
>Others, known as the "ad hocs," came to the task force's attention by way
>of plausible human sources on the ground.
>
>The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush
>administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers are drawing
>down their weapons staffs for lack of work, and adding expertise for other
>missions.
>
>Interviews and documents describing the transition from Task Force 75 to
>the new group show that site survey teams, the advance scouts of the arms
>search, will reduce from six to two their complement of experts in missile
>technology and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. A little-known
>nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency,
>called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its
>original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half.
>
>"We thought we would be much more gainfully employed, or intensively
>employed, than we were," said Navy Cmdr. David Beckett, who directs
>special nuclear programs for the team.
>
>State-of-the-art biological and chemical labs, shrunk to fit standard
>cargo containers, came equipped with enough supplies to run thousands of
>tests using DNA fingerprinting and mass spectrometry. They have been
>called upon no more than a few dozen times, none with a confirmed hit. The
>labs' director, who asked not to be identified, said some of his
>scientists were also going home.
>
>Even the sharpest skeptics do not rule out that the hunt may eventually
>find evidence of banned weapons. The most significant unknown is what U.S.
>interrogators are learning from senior Iraqi scientists, military
>industrial managers and Iraqi government leaders now in custody. If the
>nonconventional arms exist, some of them ought to know. Publicly, the Bush
>administration has declined to discuss what the captured Iraqis are
>saying. In private, U.S. officials provide conflicting reports, with some
>hinting at important disclosures. Cambone also said U.S. forces have
>seized "troves of documents" and are "surveying them, triaging them" for
>clues.
>
>At former presidential palaces in the Baghdad area, where Task Force 75
>will soon hand control to the Iraq Survey Group, leaders and team members
>refer to the covert operators as "secret squirrels." If they are making
>important progress, it has not led to "actionable" targets, according to
>McPhee and other task force members.
>
>McPhee, an artillery brigade commander from Oklahoma who was assigned to
>the task force five months ago, reflected on the weapons hunt as the sun
>set outside his improvised sleeping quarters, a cot and mosquito net set
>down in the wreckage of a marble palace annex. He smoked a cigar, but
>without the peace of mind he said the evening ritual usually brings.
>
>"My unit has not found chemical weapons," he said. "That's a fact. And I'm
>47 years old, having a birthday in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces on a
>lake in the middle of Baghdad. It's surreal. The whole thing is surreal.
>
>"Am I convinced that what we did in this fight was viable? I tell you from
>the bottom of my heart: We stopped Saddam Hussein in his WMD programs," he
>said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. "Do I know
>where they are? I wish I did . . . but we will find them. Or not. I don't
>know. I'm being honest here."
>
>Later in the conversation, he flung the unfinished cigar into the lake
>with somewhat more force than required.
>
>Team members explain their disappointing results, in part, as a
>consequence of a slow advance. Cautious ground commanders sometimes held
>weapons hunters away from the front, they said, and the task force had no
>helicopters of its own.
>
>"My personal feeling is we waited too long and stayed too far back," said
>Christopher Kowal, an expert in computer forensics who worked for Mobile
>Exploitation Team Charlie until last week.
>
>'The Bear Wasn't There'
>But two other factors -- erroneous intelligence and poor site security --
>dealt the severest blows to the hunt, according to leaders and team
>members at every level.
>
>Some information known in Washington, such as inventories of nuclear sites
>under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, did not reach
>the teams assigned to visit them. But what the U.S. government did not
>know mattered more than what it did know. Intelligence agencies had a far
>less accurate picture of Iraq's weapons program than participants believed
>at the outset of their search, they recalled.
>
>"We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the
>bear wasn't here," said a Defense Intelligence Agency officer here who
>asked not to be identified by name. "The indications and warnings were
>there. The assessments were solid."
>
>"Okay, that paradigm didn't exist," he added. "The question before was,
>where are Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons? What is the
>question now? That is what we are trying to sort out."
>
>One thing analysts must reconsider, he said, is: "What was the nature of
>the threat?"
>
>By far the greatest impediment to the weapons hunt, participants said, was
>widespread looting of Iraq's government and industrial facilities. At
>nearly every top-tier "sensitive site" the searchers reached, intruders
>had sacked and burned the evidence that weapons hunters had counted on
>sifting. As recently as last Tuesday, nearly a month after Hussein's fall
>from power, soldiers under the Army's V Corps command had secured only 44
>of the 85 top potential weapons sites in the Baghdad area and 153 of the
>372 considered most important to rebuilding Iraq's government and economy.
>
>McPhee saw early in the war that the looters were stripping his targets
>before he could check them. He cut the planning cycle for new missions --
>the time between first notice and launch -- from 96 to 24 hours. "What we
>found," he said, was that "as the maneuver units hit a target they had to
>move on, even 24 hours was too slow. By the time we got there, a lot of
>things were gone."
>
>Short and powerfully built, McPhee has spent his adult life as a combat
>officer. He calls his soldiers "bubbas" and worries about their mail. "It
>ain't good" that suspect sites are unprotected, he said, but he refused to
>criticize fighting units who left evidence unguarded.
>
>"You've got two corps commanders being told, 'Get to Baghdad,' and, oh, by
>the way, 'When you run across sensitive sites, you have to secure them,' "
>he said. "Do you secure all those sites, or do you get to Baghdad? You've
>got limited force structure and you've got 20 missions."
>
>A low point came when looters destroyed what was meant to be McPhee's
>headquarters in the Iraqi capital. The 101st Airborne Division had used
>the complex, a munitions factory called the Al Qadisiyah State
>Establishment, before rolling north to Mosul. When a reporter came
>calling, looking for Task Force 75, looters were busily stripping it
>clean. They later set it ablaze.
>
>An Altered Mission
>The search teams arrived in Iraq "looking for the smoking gun," Smith
>said, and now the mission is more diffuse -- general
>intelligence-gathering on subjects ranging from crimes against humanity
>and prisoners of war to Hussein's links with terrorists.
>
>At the peak of the effort, all four mobile exploitation teams were devoted
>nearly full time to weapons of mass destruction. By late last month, two
>of the four had turned to other questions. This week, MET Alpha,
>Gonzales's team, also left the hunt, at least temporarily. It parted with
>its chemical and biological experts, added linguists and document
>exploiters and recast itself as an intelligence team. It will search for
>weapons if leads turn up, but lately it has focused on Iraqi covert
>operations abroad and the theft of Jewish antiquities.
>
>The stymied hunt baffles search team leaders. To a person, those
>interviewed during a weeklong visit to the task force said they believed
>in the mission and the Bush administration accusations that prompted it.
>
>Yet "smoking gun" is now a term of dark irony here. Maj. Kenneth Deal,
>executive officer of one site survey team, called out the words in mock
>triumph when he found a page of Arabic text at a former Baath Party
>recreation center last week. It was torn from a translated edition of
>A.J.P. Taylor's history, "The Struggle for Mastery in Europe." At a
>"battle update brief" last week, amid confusion over the whereabouts of a
>British laboratory in transit from Talil Air Base, McPhee deadpanned to
>his staff: "I haven't a clue where the WMD is, but we can find this lab."
>
>Among the sites already visited from Central Command's top 19 are an
>underground facility at North Tikrit Hospital, an unconventional training
>camp at Salman Pak, Samarra East Airport, the headquarters of the Military
>Industrialization Commission, the Baghdad Research Complex, a storage site
>for surface-to-surface missiles in Taji, the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine
>Institute, a munitions assembly plant in Iskandariyah and an underground
>bunker at the Abu Ghurayb Palace.
>
>The bunker, toured several days later by a reporter, withstood the
>palace's destruction by at least two satellite-guided bombs. The bombs
>left six-foot holes in the reinforced concrete palace roof, driving the
>steel reinforcing rods downward in a pattern that resembled tentacles. The
>subsequent detonation turned great marble rooms into rubble.
>
>But the bunker, tunneled deep below a ground-floor kitchen, remained
>unscathed. The tunnel dropped straight down and then leveled to
>horizontal, forming corridors that extend most of the breadth of the
>palace. Richly decorated living quarters were arranged along a series of
>L-shaped bends, each protected by three angled blast doors. The doors
>weighed perhaps a ton.
>
>In a climate-control room, chemical weapons filters and carbon dioxide
>scrubbers protected the air and an overpressure blast valve stood ready to
>vent the lethal shock waves of an explosion. And a decontamination shower
>stood under an alarm panel designed to flash the message "Gas-Gaz."
>
>"Is it evidence of weapons of mass destruction?" asked Deal. "No. It's
>probably evidence of paranoia."
>
>"I don't think we'll find anything," said Army Capt. Tom Baird, one of two
>deputy operations officers under McPhee. "What I see is a lot of stuff
>destroyed." The Defense Intelligence Agency officer, describing a "sort of
>a lull period" in the search, said that whatever may have been at the
>target sites is now "dispersed to the wind."
>
>All last week, McPhee drilled his staff on speeding the transition. The
>Iraq Survey Group should have all the help it needs, he said, to take
>control of the hunt. He is determined, subordinates said, to set the stage
>for success after he departs. And he does not want to leave his soldiers
>behind if their successors can be trained in time.
>
>"I see them as Aladdin's carpet," McPhee told his staff. "Ticket home."